Conflictive urbanism in Dharavi: the dialectic of mega-projects and mega-resistances

A field work by Development Planning Unit’s students at UCL London

By Camillo Boano,

Dharavi, at the heart of Mumbai megalopolis, recently became the iconic symbol of slums in Asia and in the world through its intrinsic permanence, multiplicity, dynamism, density and scale. Partially caused from the emergent glamour of informality and feticisation of poverty, and its strategic location in the modernisation of the city, Dharavi emerged as the last frontier of oppositional practices confronting neo-liberal mega-projects of urban redevelopment and thus symbol of a contested urbanism.

In May 2009, a group of 16 students of the MSc Building and Urban Design in Development (BUDD) course at the Development Planning Unit (DPU) of the University College London (UCL) has been involved in an intensive three-week field course in Mumbai. Developed as a collaborative effort between the DPU, the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute For Architecture (KRVIA), the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC), Mahila Milan and the National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF), the studio-type exercise explored such contested urbanism in a megalopolis, which on one hand is India’s financial capital, and on the other a city in which half the residents live in informal settlements: a “Maximum City”. Students were engaged, supported by the partners, in urban analysis, livelihoods profiling and in the development of alternative urban design visions to the current homogeneous and top down Dharavi Redevelopment Project (DRP).

The group elaborates on the politics of density, the spatial tactics and dialectics that have emerged in the urban transformation driven by neoliberal approaches. At the centre of the analysis, processes of urban transformations were embedded in policy discourses and competing visions over the land of Dharavi, its identity and its role in the production of Mumbai.

Locating the exercise: a set of competing visions
Popularly known as Asia’s largest slum, Dharavi is characterised by its strategic location in the centre of Mumbai, and thus finds itself at the heart of a challenging, highly contested debate over the future of the city. International developers, bureaucrats, state agencies and civil society are engaged in multiple confrontations on land and density, while futuristic Dubai-style or Shanghai-style landscapes are developed over, what is now, prime real estate.

Historically evolving from a small fishing village, as Mumbai’s urban development and corresponding squatter settlements pushed northwards, Dharavi became its geographical centre located between inner-city districts and the financial centre Bandra-Kurla Complex, near Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport.

fisherman village

This case of contested urbanism highlights land values and built densities at the core of the argument over Mumbai’s future, accentuating inequalities and driving the contest over space. Significant government and market pressures towards becoming a world-class city and thus wiping out ‘slums’ push against the struggle for a bottom-up and inclusive development process promoted by civil society and heterogeneous citizen groups in Dharavi.

Due to its strategic location, demographic pressures on the island city and global transformative goals, the DRP, developed by the architect Mukesh Mehta, was thus introduced as integrated special planning area in 2004. Mehta proposes several physical alterations for Dharavi, a vision substantiated by an artificial and instrumental division of Dharavi into five sectors allocated to five private sector developers that do not correspond to existing community boundaries in Dharavi; a maximum increase of Floor Space Index which contribute to higher urban densities; and the adoption of a spatial transformation from horizontal, low-rise ‘slums’ to a high-rise podium style typology (G+12 and more), literally, replacing informal settlements with high-rise developments irrespective of the vibrant economy and society, informal and complex constructed over stratifications, adaptations and subsequent historical modifications.

Thus, such massive mega-project top-down narrative has made possible the emergence of an alternative critical vision of the DRP from civil society and academics, as invited from the government of Maharashtra to form an Expert Advisory Panel, offering suggestions, options and at the same time maintaining a close and highly strategic relationship with government bodies in order to function as facilitators between different institutional levels. Such a confrontational environment boosted the development of different grassroots initiatives and spatial experimentations that challenge the DRP relocation of residents, the complete lack of an inclusive process and the possible consequences of a government/market-driven process of redevelopment irrespective of the social and spatial multiplicity of Dharavi.

The meta-narrative of transformative urban processes
As many other contemporary urban scenarios, Dharavi is located in a web of contested urbanism through a perception of the production of space as an inherently conflictual process, where various forms of injustice are not only manifested, but produced and reproduced. In the studio exercise, students developed a conceptual definition of transformation as a process that occurs as dominant and resistant forces converge within a context of cooperative conflict.

Grounded in Lefebrve, Bourdieau and Foucault as theoretical bases, the exercise develops an understanding of how the complexity and dynamism form and transforms Dharavi. Students conceived the production of space and policy as appropriate and relevant when the criteria of diversity, adaptability, flexibility and multiplicity are present. The critical integration of these criteria was determined as a prerequisite for sustaining a transformative process.

The multiplicity of conflicting forces, visions, identities and power relations exist within Dharavi, where urban change is driven by central dominant forces and countered by peripheral resistant forces that struggle for inclusion in the process, with the latter’s claims negotiated by the Expert Advisory Panel to the DRP. Some actors have adopted strategies for inclusion and influence in this process by acting as a collective, as is the case with the Alliance of SPARC, NSDF and Mahila Milan. An identified platform for congruence is the productive capacity of Dharavi, providing an opportunity for cooperation within this contested environment. The desired result is that the aspirations and assets of the citizens of Dharavi become valued and included as integral parts of the urban network at multiple scales.

The outcome
The spatial tensions between top-down urban strategies and bottom up tactics of spatial adaptations and urban activism were substantiated by the students in an urban analysis and numerous interviews specifically focused on unpacking the complex and multiple nature of the work-living environment of Dharavi, both at the commercial level as well as at the level of the home-based activities. Mapping, spatial analysis, livelihoods profiles and different diagrammatic tools were developed to render the unique nature of Dharavi evident and communicable. At the same time the fieldwork enabled a better understanding of the urban forms present in Dharavi, and of their association with different uses and social interactions especially in relation to multi-functional open spaces, organic clusters and incremental evolution of the built form; adding storey to the ground level to accommodate changing needs at the family and at the community level.

The findings of the study indicate a clear disconnect between the proposed plan for the redevelopment and the current situation of the stakeholders most affected by the process: the citizens of Dharavi. The students’ analysis directly informed their recommendations which comes in the form of development scenarios, each containing various proposals that reconcile their findings to different visions for Dharavi. These scenarios were created in recognition of the diversity of stakeholders involved in the DRP process, including the Expert Advisory Panel to the DRP as the prime civil society representative body, in order to offer new options and perspectives as well as to support continuous and incremental negotiations.

The First Scenario conceded to the guidelines of the DRP, while asserting critical responsive alternatives in regards to the transformation of social well-being and livelihoods. It highlights the need for greater transparency, citizen involvement and the recognition of the heterogeneous nature of the residents of Dharavi. It offers a plural approach to housing provision, a more adaptive and enabling to people through the process of transformation. It recognises the potential of existing households to participate more equitably in the process.

The Second Scenario, working with certain established policy provisions, departed dramatically from the current DRP, especially in terms of physical typology and the five-sector parcel zoning. It underlines the multiplicity and diversity of the citizens of Dharavi, and is located at a wider scale and complex urban proposal, suggesting a range of architectural, morphological and functional options, each adapted to specific conditions of residents, recognising the historical quarters and the emotional attachment of citizens to such spaces.

A Post-narrative: a critical perspective
Mumbai and Dharavi have lived under a microscope of analysis and study since the early
1990s. The multitude of institutions, organisations and professionals offering services and producing alternative visions amplifies daily. In fact, the exercise marks the fourth consecutive year the Development Planning Unit has conducted research in the city. It can easily be said that Dharavi is in itself becoming a concept resource model, representing contested urbanism and the general subject of slum upgrading and redevelopment. Just as Los Angeles and Las Vegas have become urban ideologies, through Mike Davis’s City of Quartz and Venturi’s Learning from Las Vegas, so too has Mumbai (Dharavi) become an international breeding ground for debate and research. This argument also manifests in the recent release of the film Slumdog Millionaire, where a world audience now has a hyper image mechanism and conversation piece to attach with the concept of slum and the city of Mumbai.

Despite Dharavi’s fertility in containing the complexities and contradictions that appeal to professionals and academics alike, we must not forget that it is a living, breathing place without the fantastic nature and allure of Los Angeles or the stylized adult playground of Las Vegas. The truth of Dharavi lies in its extreme situation of conflict. Its appeal as a resource parallels the struggles of daily survival, the necessity for attention and solutions that can humanise conditions that are anything but.

The MSc Building and Urban Design in Development student’s work clearly illustrates that there is much more to Dharavi than its poverty-stricken imagination, as it flourishes with economic richness, communal and family oriented networks, which breathe and sustain a diversity of life into the area. In this case Dharavi redevelopment needs to find an appropriate balance in order to inform both experience and subsequent proposals that will lead to inclusive transformative outcomes for individuals and the city as a whole.

At present there seems to be great disjunction between grand expectations and acknowledged reality. The two scenarios students have proposed strive to bridge these stated expectations with the realities of daily social and economic activity. By addressing policy implications alongside basic necessities for sustaining and transforming community and livelihoods within a strategically planned urban landscape, the exercise foretells the establishment of Dharavi as the pulsating heart of Mumbai, rather than an area branded with informality and poverty, whose future is determined in regards to land value and market trends alone and probably goundedzeroes.

The intense and interdisciplinary experience students have made in Mumbai, impossible without the professional, committed and friendly support of KRVIA, SPARC, Mahila Milan, NSDF and the citizens of Dharavi, could be located in the contemporary debate on urbanism and “right to the city” and could give light to a global call for a renewed role of urban design and architecture as resistance practices for an open and just urban development. A call that the Development Planning Unit is continuously working on.
Developed as a collaborative effort between the DPU, the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute For Architecture, the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC), Mahila Milan and the National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF), the studio-type exercise explored such contested urbanism in a megalopolis, which on one hand is India’s financial capital, and on the other a city in which half the residents live in informal settlements: a “Maximum City”.

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15 September 2019

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